RANDOM MUSINGS

Formal Writing Training

by Robert J. Sawyer

A question I hear a lot is: "As a writer, did you receive any
formal training?"

My pat answer is yes: I wore a tuxedo to all my university
classes.

Seriously, I took three courses in scriptwriting at university,
plus one in creative writing (DAW novelist Tanya Huff was in the
same class, by the way). Did these courses help? No. The two
best courses I ever took for learning how to write had nothing to
do with composition: one was in Greek tragedy, the other was on
the early history of English plays.

I learned to write the way most professional writers did: by
very carefully reading the work of others, plus reading many
books on writing and grammar, and the commentaries by various
writers on their own work.

The single best way to learn how to write, in my view, is reading
attentively. Find some work you like and ask yourself why the
author chose that word, that punctuation mark, that
point-of-view, that place to break the scene, and so on.

Books that I admired whose influence can be clearly seen in my
work (even if it's only in the way I wield a particular
punctuation mark) include John Jay Osborn's The Paper Chase,
Arthur C. Clarke's2001, Robert Silverberg's Lord Valentine's
Castle, Xan Fielding's translation of Pierre Boulle's Monkey
Planet, Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon,
Terence M. Green'sBarking Dogs, Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird,
Fifth Business by Robertson Davies, and Robert B. Parker's
"Spenser" novels.

Note that there are several non-SF books on the list above: I
firmly believe it's extremely important for an SF writer to read
outside the genre. William Gibson didn't invent his version of
Cyberpunk in a vacuum. Among his favourite writers were Dashiell
Hammett and Raymond Chandler  whose gritty worlds are clearly
ancestors of Gibson's Sprawl.

So if you want to learn to write, pick up a good book  and
start reading.